Added: Just to pour salt on an old wound, to no good purpose: You know, I still haven't completely gotten over the experience of the primary campaign, in which a rather amazing number of people who have long and loudly appreciated my critiques of tech culture then castigated and unfollowed and even blocked me for supporting Hillary Clinton, though I did and do so on the basis of exactly the same assumptions, concerns, and arguments they presumably affirmed in my arguments about tech. The same trivialization of radical and revolutionary politics via the entertaining distractions of consumer fandom and marketing deceptions are in evidence in tech discourse and Sanders for President discourse -- no party primary contest is revolutionary and "look, a birdie!" is indistinguishable from Mountain Dew is the revolution, sorry not sorry. The same choice of detailed policy (even policies with which I disagree on the details) over sloganeering distinguished the campaigns in their communication emphases and strategies. My preference for the best actual but of course non-ideal candidate on offer to give my support as well is compelled by the same criteria as my preference for accounts of technoscience progress focused on historical struggles over distribution of costs, risks, and benefits of change rather than narratives in which progress is a destiny, a growing toypile, or the gift of elite benefactors. My general understanding of political progress as the result of mostly exhausting, if occasionally exhilarating, historical stakeholder struggles with both partisan dimensions mucked in frustrating real-time problem solving and compromise and pressure in the direction of reform and stage-setting for further reform inter-implicated in deeper transformational education, agitation, and organization work to shift the terrain of the possible and the important is very much the same when it recognizes the superiority of the Democratic over the Republican, Libertarian, or Green Parties in the United States, the superiority of Clinton over Sanders before and Trump now, or rejects the reactionary moonshine of corporate-military and New Age bourgeois-boutique futurisms that suffuse public technoscience discourse (including, quite dangerously, too many liberal circles in which prevailing reactionary marketing discourse for feudal and fraudulent tech practices have gotten muddled up with well-meaning but under-informed Democratic desires to support scientific research and public infrastructure and fact-based policy making). I find it hard to shake the rather demoralizing suspicion that many who have supported my critique of feudal tech-talk simply didn't take much care to understand the actual substance of the arguments I have been making but happened to agree with me about the villains in the narrative -- mostly ridiculous robot cultists and heinous venture capitalists and uselessly idiotic "Thought Leaders" -- and enjoyed the baroque gargoyle sentences with which I excoriated them... but happened to think of Hillary Clinton as a similar villain and simply didn't much care to find me supporting the Cthillary Monster in her quest to bathe the world in blood from atop a mountain of cash where she dines on babies with a cabal of neoliberal billionaires. Beset by balloon animals to my left and to my right, forgive me if I retreat to the Hufflepuff common room. I've got goddamn lectures to craft and papers to grade and the stoopid, it burns us.